The last couple weeks have been very rough at work. I've been doing more hours than I care to.  Last week I did approximately 77 hours.  This week I'll probably do another 60.

Had a major negotiation with a major publisher to license their trademark fall apart today. Months of effort wasted. The terms had been agreed on but the lawyers killed it. Every little detail had to be micro-managed, signed off on by every party, to a scale that was simply unmanageable. It would have cost us as much to comply with the contract's endless (and often arbitrary) compliance requirements as it would have to make the game.  So today we finally had to throw in the towel and say "Thanks but no thanks, this is way too much of a headache for us to deal with." One can only imagine the kinds of headaches are involved in licensing a famous book or movie to be made into a game.

Meanwhile, work here keeps backing up. www.WinCustomize.com is slowly getting fixed up but there's a ton of little bugs on it that have to be taken care of. And those bugs affect JoeUser.com exquisitely. 

The only bright side is that our internal software projects are going well. Got good news from the ObjectBar 2 team, DesktopX 2.4 is nearly ready and ThinkDesk components are coming along nicely. And the Galactic Civilizations II team has some really neat stuff in the works.

I did spend some time today completing the "Prelude to War" campaign for Galactic Civilizations: Altarian prophecy (www.galciv.com).  I think people will like this a lot when it comes out.

But overall, there's just so much to do that it's unbelievable.